Text FanciPy

Text FanciPy is a Python tool for converting plain English letters (A-Za-z) in a text to their Unicode counterparts in various “fancy” styles, and vice versa. However, note that any “fancy-styled” text is not proper Unicode text, so it’s not searchable, and it’s not guaranteed to be displayed correctly on all devices. It’s best used for decorative purposes only.

Features

• Converts the plain English letters in your text to various fancy styles (which are still plain Unicode text).
• Converts fancy-styled text back to correct text.
• Performs Unicode decomposition before the conversion, and Unicode normalization after the conversion. This way, accented Latin letters also get processed.
• Can be used via a command line interface (CLI) or imported as a Python package.

Text FanciPy supports several “fancy styles” for text conversion. Only styles with full A-Za-z coverage in The Unicode Standard version 15.0 are included:

Installation

To install Text FanciPy, run:

python3 -m pip install --upgrade text-fancipy

For the current development version:

python3 -m pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/twardoch/text_fancipy

Command-line usage

After installation, fancipy can be used directly from the command line.

With text specified as an argument

Convert text to a fancy style:

fancipy <style> -t "Your text"

For example, to convert to Bold style:

$ fancipy bold -t "Hello World"
𝐇𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐨 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝

Convert text back from a fancy style to plain text:

fancipy undo -t "𝐇𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐨 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝"

With piping

$ echo "Hello World" | fancipy bold | fancipy undo
Hello World

With files

You can also specify input and output files:

fancipy <style> -f input.txt -o output.txt

Python usage

You can use Text FanciPy as a library in your Python scripts.

from text_fancipy.fancipy import fancipy, unfancipy_all

# Convert to fancy text
fancy_text = fancipy("Your Text", "bold")

# Convert back to plain text
plain_text = unfancipy_all(fancy_text)

Changes

• v1.4.0: Unicode decomposition and normalization
• v1.3.0: Renamed some styles
• v1.1.0: Change the available styles
• v1.0.3: Minor fixes
• v1.0.0: Initial release

License

• Text FanciPy written by Adam Twardoch, with assistance from GPT-4
• Copyright (c) 2023 Adam Twardoch
• Licensed under the Apache-2.0 license

Contact

Open an issue and describe your problem or suggestion.